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Andrew Sullivan Explains His Zionism

He’s in it for the guys

by
Jesse Oxfeld
August 07, 2009
An Israeli paratrooper.(IDF via Getty Images)
An Israeli paratrooper.(IDF via Getty Images)

We missed this on Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic blog last week, but Tablet Magazine contributor and Atlantic national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg pointed us to it yesterday. Sullivan, best known as the gay, Palin-hating, Obama-supporting, former-New Republic-editing, British conservative, considers himself a Zionist, and responding to Patrick Healy’s article on the gay scene in Beirut in last week’s New York Times Travel section, he reveals why: “I suspect it was seeing beautiful Israeli soldiers as a teenager on a trip to the Holy Land that made me a Zionist.”

Could Sullivan be onto a way to increase support for Israel among American teens and college students? (Especially among college students, who are of course sex-obsessed but among whom lately anti-Israel pro-Palestinianism seems to be becoming increasingly de rigueur? Suddenly, that whole silly Central Park “Tel Aviv beach”—complete, as you’ll recall, with scantily-clad sabras, of both the male and female persuasions, makes much more sense.

Vacation Time [Andrew Sullivan via Jeffrey Goldberg]
Previously: And the Beach Goes On

Jesse Oxfeld, a former executive editor and publisher of Tablet Magazine, is a freelance theater critic. He was The New York Observer’s theater critic from 2009 to 2014.